


Spells and Incantations

by 43degrees



Category: Methyl Ethel (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, M/M, i can and i will fill this fandom with fics myself if i have to, six fics in so it's about time an AU fic came onto the table
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 17:26:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20586257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/43degrees/pseuds/43degrees
Summary: Lyndon Blue is an ace nerdy witch and he won't rest until his friends see what they could have together.On a fundamental level, imbuing the elements of romance into a liquid is something Lyndon’s pretty good at. He didn’t just get by in potions class, he aced it. Pun intended. And he means to put a love potion to good use, just not on himself...





	Spells and Incantations

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the opening line of Winter People's song Gallons.

Lyndon’s cold fingers fumble for the house keys that are lost somewhere in his pockets. He can hear the small pieces of metal clanging together, the whole street must be able to, if anyone else also happens to be awake at 3am. The keys slip out of some pocket he might’ve already looked in and fall onto the concrete with a loud ting. Without a second thought, he casts a quick  _ muette _ incantation over the keys so that they don’t make another sound. 

The only difference from being outside and passing into the sharehouse is that the air feels cooked motionless inside the kitchen, just as cold as the winter night. He swings his backpack around to his front and unzips the opening and pulls out the lukewarm kebab that he had bought at the train station earlier. He pulls off the plastic bag, regretting using his  _ muette _ incantation on his keys and not the entire contents of his bag but he can’t wait fifteen minutes for the incantation to expire because he has to devour the kebab. Except every noise seems to fill the room with the life of day. The metal zipper cutting across jagged teeth on the bag, the plastic bag crinkling as it deflates, the paper wrap around the kebab folding as it heats up, and even the hard plastic pop of the microwave button hits the room like a bomb. 

Lyndon bites hard on his lip, his cold thumb at the ready on the microwave button to pop it before the ding sounds out and wakes up his housemate. With three seconds left to spare, he opens the microwave door and the strong aroma of a steaming hot late night kebab pervades the kitchen. 

A loud groan crowds out of Thom’s bedroom. 

“What is that  _ smell _ ?!” 

A split second later, Thom emerges from his bedroom. He wraps a fluffy dressing gown tight around his waist, his neck craning to follow the scent. Lyndon clutches his kebab in both hands. Steam rises into his face. His mouth waters for the taste. A sudden urge of competitiveness erupts in him, like a beast who has cornered its prey, and he can’t stave off his hunger anymore. He takes two large munches as if to warn Thom off from his hunt. 

“God, that smells delicious,” Thom says with a croaky voice. 

The two stand opposite each other in the dark room, the street lamp outside offering a dim yellow glow through the dusty kitchen window. 

“I want some.”

Between bites, Lyndon mumbles, “It’s not gluten free.”

“Why do you torture me like this?” Thom groans. He opens up the fridge and hangs over the door, yellow light beaming past him like a floodlight.

Lyndon shamelessly devours the kebab, blind to anything else happening. He opens his mouth, bites, chews, swallows. Repeat. When he nears the end of the kebab, where all the sauce and lettuce has been wedged into the folded corners, his vision starts to come to. He watches Thom close the fridge defeatedly and watches the little puffs of air that burst out of the pressurized sides of the fridge. 

Lyndon leans against the counter, regaining his composure after his feast. “Didn’t know you’d be -- sorry to wake you.”

Thom gathers the lapels of the dressing gown close under his chin. “Ah, nah. I was already awake… thinking about  _ things _ and  _ people _ and  _ stuff _ . Ugh.” He points his big toe to a crack in the tiles and then purses his lips at Lyndon. “What are you doing home so late? I thought your exams were over.”

“They are,” Lyndon says without thinking. He’s so used to being honest around Thom that when it comes to lying, well, he’s not very good at it. He crumples the paper wrap of the kebab and shoves it in the bin. “I’m just uh, doing some… extra work.”

Thom yawns, speaking the first few words through it. “What’s there to do? I thought you were on holidays.”

Lyndon wrings his wrists. He’s trying his best to be vague because it’s best that Thom doesn’t know that what he’s actually been doing is staying late in the library trying to research love potions to use on his housemate. It’s kind of his own fault, really… If he hadn’t enrolled himself in a third year Philosophy of Magic unit before he was technically allowed to do it, he might never have both come onto the university’s watchlist for trying to get his degree done too quickly, and he might also have never crossed paths with Jake Webb. It’s also  _ not his fault _ for being so enamoured with Jake himself. In that sense, he sympathises with Thom, but it is  _ kind of _ his fault for deciding to invite Jake over to the house one Sunday afternoon, when Thom was home, so that their paths should also cross. He knew they would hit it off, he felt great satisfaction in seeing their friendship quickly blossom, and yet he felt zero satisfaction in seeing them both fail to see anything between them beyond friendship. 

“Don’t tell me you’re doing a winter course.”

Lyndon feels Thom’s eyes on him, a dark mass in the night. Lyndon knows he’s just trying to show concern over his wellbeing considering how intense his previous semester had been on his mental health, but it would be great if Thom could just back down on this one so that he can get on with researching how to use the most effective kind of magic to get Thom and Jake to realise that they love each other. That’s all he’s trying to do! And Thom’s few but pointed questions are a threat to the little fortification Lyndon has left in the face of the near-rising sun. 

“I am doing a winter course,” Lyndon lies. 

“You know, a bachelor of arts and witchery is meant to be a four year degree for a reason, right? You’re not meant to get it done in two.”

“I’m just trying this out. It’s only four weeks, not too much of a workload.”

“Four weeks!” Thom shakes his head, wandering back to his bedroom. “You have to take a break at some point, Donnie.”

Lyndon grimaces at the nickname. He would agree with Thom otherwise -- four weeks of studying is exactly the opposite of an easy-going study load, but for now, Thom seems to have bought the story. It’s only a matter of time, anyway, until Lyndon is able to navigate the most appropriate potion to use on Thom. Then maybe he can enjoy his winter holidays without thinking about how alone Thom must feel without the person he’s so clearly in love with to cuddle in bed during cold nights like these. Thom can thank him later. 

-

The thing is, making a love potion isn’t easy. On a fundamental level, imbuing the elements of romance into a liquid is something Lyndon’s pretty good at. He didn’t just get by in potions class, he aced it. Pun intended. See, what they didn’t grade him on in first year potions was on any element of sexual attraction within the love potion. All he had to understand was the properties of romantic love, which he knows full well. It was his capacity to understand  _ sexual _ attraction, or not so much  _ understand _ it, but empathise with it,  _ feel _ it. And he can’t. He’s never been able to, never had an interest in it, and thankfully it was never a criteria in the marking rubric of his potions class or else he wouldn’t have the grade point average that he does today. It was never a problem until now. 

See, he remade the exact love potion that gave him a high distinction, better even, because the quality of ingredients is increasing each year with more and more universities cracking down on magic elitism. Not to say that he agrees with their approach to those of the population who can wield magic, but the demand for better quality ingredients is doing wonders for potion-making. So back when he got this grand idea to get his friends together, he spent an entire afternoon delicately putting together the perfect love potion and slipped it into their coffees, and yet,  _ nothing _ changed.

Nothing. 

He couldn’t believe it. He thought he did everything right, even went back to the alchemy lab the next morning and whipped up Perfect Love Potion 2.0 and administered it as the dressing to a salad that he served them both. Same result. Same doughy eyed looks between them, same tender touches… Oh, it drove him up the wall when he saw Thom and Jake sitting on the couch together, Thom’s feet in Jake’s lap, Jake’s hands on Thom’s ankles, and then  _ nothing _ happened of it.

He could never have imagined himself saying this to anyone, but he really wants to yell at them,  _ just fuck already!  _ And that’s when he realises why his potions aren’t working. It’s that the potions are just doing what Lyndon knows best -- how to love people. What they’re lacking, what he’s failing to imbue into those little glass bottles, is a way to trigger  _ action _ . How is he meant to activate that when he would never act on love in the way other people would? 

It doesn’t stump him for long. He knows he has to change tactics. That’s what had him in the library so late this past week; he was researching any book he could find in the library that documented love potion-making and copying down their compositions. Only, as the nights went on, he reads about the power of love, the passivity of it, the longing, the respectfulness of it, and reads about the power of sex, of want and need and hunger. And he comes to another realisation that throwing a potion over Thom and Jake is never going to work whether he makes it himself or goes off a recipe made by someone else who understands sexual attraction more than him. He won’t ever be able to impress the action trigger that Thom and Jake so desperately need to activate. 

He could try writing scroll spells but the thing with spells is that they only work if they’re spoken by the caster to the intended recipient. Witch law decrees that you can’t influence someone else’s actions unto another, only between caster and recipient. In other words, it’s an exchange, not a gift. 

“The thing with spells,” Jake tells him, “Is that they’re the most difficult mode of witchcraft to wrap your head around. You have to be very careful with the words you choose. Every word has weight to it, and said in the wrong order can create unintended effects. That’s why lyrical spells are so interesting. Not only are they incredibly powerful and difficult to create, the poetic content of the words makes it even harder to not misconstrue meaning.”

“I remember you talking about your thesis earlier, something about how musicians who rhyme nouns by simply adding suffixes weaken the--”

“Well I wouldn’t say  _ weaken _ . It’s not to say that they aren’t good songs or that music can’t supplement the strength of lyrics, but true rhyming, even  _ unique _ rhyming bounded by beautiful language in lyric lines aren’t an easy accomplishment.”

“What he’s saying is that you have to be a genius to write good song spells,” Thom says. 

Jake tilts his head. “I’m not saying that…”

“No, I know,” Thom says, slinging his arm around Jake’s waist. “You set a very high standard for yourself. You too, Lyndon! Why are you asking Jake about his thesis anyway, I thought you were turned off by grammatical technicalities.”

Lyndon’s eyes linger on Thom’s hand splayed out over Jake’s hip. “I’m just trying to find the right words…” He raises his gaze to Jake’s. “...To say what needs to be said.”

-

He’d talked to Jake about his master’s research in hopes of trying to find the right words to convey what he sees between Jake and Thom, to convey what  _ everyone _ sees, except seemingly themselves. But Jake had only made writing spells seem even harder and, in turn, more admirable that he would do it in such a meaningful medium as music. He finally talks to some other friends, seeks some advice from his lecturers, and what he garners is that he needs to write the spell such that is conveys a truth to Thom and a truth to Lyndon. The problem is, Thom prides himself so much on being honest and living authentically that it’s rubbed off on Lyndon and he doesn’t have anything left to hide. Thom knows that he’s asexual, knows that he’s the first one in his family to study magic, knows that he doesn’t think anything less of Thom for being non-magic, and even knows what Lyndon’s favourite colour is. 

He becomes so exasperated that he starts to collect hundreds of unfinished spell scrolls on his desk at home. Which, actually, starts to work out in an unexpected way. Thom, being the caring friend that he is, checks up on Lyndon often, makes sure he’s been eating and getting enough sleep and sometimes hangs around in his room telling Lyndon about his day, or what their mutual friends have been up to, which of course always includes Jake’s happenings. And Lyndon’s just hoping that one of these days, when Thom plants himself on the edge of Lyndon’s desk, he might happen to look down and catch a line of one of the spells. Lyndon even starts to make a habit of ‘accidentally’ leaving scrolls around the house. A few near the fruit bowl, a couple on the porch table, one just outside of Thom’s door if that isn’t enough of a massive hint. 

By the time the winter holidays end and the new semester is starting, Lyndon’s pretty sure that something’s gone right. He’s not saying that he wasn’t eavesdropping when he heard Thom invite Jake into his room, and he’s not saying that he cast an  _ amplifier _ incantation over Thom’s door when he shut him and Jake inside his room… Yeah. Hearing a confession from both of them was sweet relief, but Lyndon couldn’t wait for the incantation to wear off because of what they immediately started doing afterwards. 

He has to say, it’s pretty ironic that his failed attempts at casting magic over his two friends are what actually got them to act. 


End file.
